Introduction to Microformats

Contents

What are Microformats?

Microformats are a way of adding simple markup to human-readable data items such as events, contact details or locations, on web pages, so that the information in them can be extracted by software and indexed, searched for, saved, cross-referenced or combined.

More technically, they are items of semantic markup, using just standard "plain old semantic HTML" (i.e. "POSH") with a set of common class-names and "rel" values. They are open and available, freely, for anyone to use.

Why Microformats

Why did we come up with microformats?

In short, microformats are the convergence of a number of trends:

a logical next step in the evolution of web design and information architecture

a way for people and organizations to publish richer information themselves, without having to rely upon centralized services

an acknowledgement that (outside of specialist areas) "traditional" metadata efforts (e.g. meta tags) have either failed or taken so long to garner any adoption, that a new approach was necessary